Emerging in the middle of the last century, political science combines data and theory to help us understand the political world. Professor Robert E. Goodin, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Political Science and co-editor of The British Journal of Political Science, introduces five seminal works from major sub-disciplines. His choices are accessible starting points that open up new ways of thinking: from big data to deep case studies, these are five books that will help you to make sense of the world – and to change it.
"Thinking in terms of #legibility and illegibility explains so many of the things that are confusing about large software companies. It explains why companies do many things that seem obviously counter-productive, why the rules in practice are so often out of sync with the rules as written, and why companies are surprisingly willing to tolerate rule-breaking in some contexts."
Attached: 1 image 🎉 New paper in PNAS: Urban highways are barriers to social ties https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408937122 Highways are barriers that cut opportunities for social ties. We quantify this effect by overlaying the US highway network with millions of social ties from Twitter.
We can not rely on top-down institutions to implement the changes we need to address climate change, the slow reduction in top soil, etc. Top-down institutions rely on too much simplification of processes so those at the top can make decisions.
Bottom up institutions allow us to bring more perspectives, more information, more brainpower, to solve the complex problems we are facing.
Friendgineers: I thought I had written about Seeing Like a State, but apparently not. It's very easy to fall into the habit of seeing like a state. However, it's not very useful.
A very short summary of "Seeing Like a State", by James C. Scott:
How do I hold all these things?
Don Curren 🇨🇦🇺🇦
Mike Williamson
Ben Rosengart
UnicycleSam
Cass Alexandru @Zurihac, PLDI
Leon Rosenshein
Aknorals⚑Ⓐ 🏴